Science fiction is littered with the failures of writers who should have known better to accurately predict the future… But it’s even more littered with the failure of reality to keep up with their warped ideas. Here I shall consider a few of my favorites.

Permanent Undercaste of Developmentally Limited Slave WorkersBrave New World

A knowledge work job for life, constant lusty adulation from lower caste members of the opposite sex, after work orgies, free drugs, and a workforce of fetal alcohol syndrome hobbit monkeys at one’s beck and call… Who wouldn’t want to live in Huxley’s world?

Moralizing neo-cons, that’s who!

As someone who’s devoted a lot of thought to transhumanism lately, I have to say that this book remains a challenging one. In some ways, Huxley’s argument in Brave New World looks like the sine qua non for people like Francis Fukuyama freaking out about the H+ movement. While we don’t have the technology to do some of the things described in this book yet, perhaps the intention is there? I do hope so, because it would be a vast improvement over the Epsilons-Shopping-at-Walmart stories people on the Eclipse Phase Facebook page came back with as soon as I took up this line of thought.

Pretty People Forced to Wear Hideous Masks to Make Them AverageHarrison Bergerand

Leaving the most recent Lady Gaga video aside, Vonnegut’s parable of an average American Übermensch forced to wear myopia-inducing goggles, a racoon coat made of metal racoons, and a grotesque mask hasn’t played out as advertised. As anyone in human resources will tell you, above average people are valuable. Your best approach is to put them in offices where all the C students don’t have to look at them, stack their workload so high that their brains don’t work much better than Harrison Bergerand’s Dad’s at the end of the day, and pay them enough to behave. After just a decade of this treatment, the combination of repetitive stress injuries, office chair-related back pain, and fat rolls sprouted from years of drinking and poor diet normally add up to the same handicaps forced upon Bergerand… no mask required!

Really, Kurt, you were over-thinking the problem.

Soviets on Jupiter (or Luna, or Mars, or Anyplace, Really)2010: A Space Odyssey

Mr. Clarke, get real. The Soviets’ played-out, oppressive social regime and internal instability meant that they couldn’t get to the friggin’ Moon, let alone building a space ship capable of travel to the Jovian system. Oh, wait… Americans can’t, either.

How embarrassing.

Reduction to the Status of Chattel for Women (May Substitute White People, Academics, Gun Lovers, Mormons, or Whatever Freaked the Author Out Most) The Handmaid’s Tale

Although I actually think LDS paranoia about being oppressed for wanting to have lots of babies a la Ender’s Game is more entertaining, I’m including Margaret Atwood here because she’s such an ivory tower Henny Penny about being described as a science fiction author. Get over it, Margaret; no one’s going to force you to show up at Worldcon. It’s almost as silly as Lisa Gerrard and Brendan Perry freaking out about being called a goth band. Also, Ken MacLeod wrote a novel about talking squids in space, and it was fucking awesome, so you shut up.

I was going to write something about alarmist, overwrought narratives posing as plausibly framed social commentary, but look, I just ended up going off on Margaret Atwood for a whole paragraph instead. Whatever, moving on…

Food Pills The Jetsons

I tried to make these when I was a kid by taking white bread and squishing it into the densest little dough bullets I could. When you added peanut butter and jelly, it didn’t work so well, but I’m sure modern food technology could do better than an eight year old with a rolling pin and time on his hands. Never mind that compressing a full meal into a pill would result in a pill that weighed about half a pound. The demand is out there. “But the Jetsons was a cartoon,” you protest. Pish tosh! Serious sci-fi writers kicked this idea around, too. Of course, if they had kicked an actual food pill they would have probably stubbed their toes badly and discarded this idea right quick.

Absurdist TotalitarianismBrazil

The failure to appear of a preposterously Kafkaesque state where interrogators wear weird baby masks and dissidents get hung in garment bags aboard mobile armored hall closets would mark Terry Gilliam as one of sci-fi’s dimmest lights in the art of prediction, if not for the abject lack of imagination it displays on the part of the oppressive regimes we already have. Really, if glue-huffing African child soldiers could work out that neon wigs and women’s clothing would freak the fuck out of their opponents, you’d think the meatheads at Abu-Gharaib could have come up with something better than scaring people with dogs and making them form naked human pyramids. They could have been using, I don’t know, creepy octopus masks or something. Were I an Iraqi detainee, I’d pretty much poo myself instantly if some crazy white man dressed like a cephalopod came at me with a list of questions.

Unreliable Experimental Medical Procedures That Make Mice and Retarded People Smarter Flowers for Algernon

Sadly, this is not a widely explored trope, but that’s okay, because Keyes had it in the pocket. The key implication of his idea, though, has not inspired the type of vigorous exploration that, say, virtual reality did. Which is too bad, because if you could perform an operation to make mentally retarded people more functional, just think of how you could improve all of the people who are technically of average intelligence but do stupid, stupid things all of the damned time.

And think of all the incidental spin offs you’d glean from the massive amount of human experimentation along the critical path to reach this outcome! It’s clearly a winner.

Breakfast of champions is about a young farm boy named Yigg who has one eye on a stalk. He is also green — sometimes purple. When the hay harvest is ready, Yigg decides he no longer likes eating hay puffs and goes on a quest for better cereals. Tragically his eye stalk is severed. Blind, disoriented, still without cereal, Yigg comes upon a wise woman. The wise woman tells him that he can actually see. Heartened, Yigg presses on and falls into a well. It turns out he couldn’t see after all; the woman was a charlatan. Yigg dies a lonely death. Someone else gets cereal, but not him. When his spirit comes before Saint Peter, the whole narrative self-implodes in a wild burst of illogic (as this is a Vonnegut novel; Saint Peter simply has no place here). A tornado sweeps through heaven, casting Yigg down to his home planet, which, if you had not yet guessed, turns out to be Mars. The wells are running dry; the canals are barren. There is still no cereal. Yigg becomes a bull fighter. Since he is still blind, this ends poorly. Finally a bird arrives with news of a verdant land. Yigg, reconciled to his blindness, makes his way there with aid of a hurley stick and a seeing eye creature named Bono (no relation). A musical song & dance number ensues, but is interrupted by Martian bears. Not one of the dancers survives. Their gory remains fertilize the land. Wheat germinates. Yigg, regenerated (Martians can regenerate), harvests it and threshes it on a flat blue rock. The remaining seeds are added to a milky substance exuded by the local foliage. Yigg, having persevered, enjoys his breakfast. FIN.

In the spirit of misattributing texts on the intertr0nz to Kurt Vonnegut, I wrote this completely inaccurate plot summary of Breakfast of Champions this morning for a co-worker who made the mistake of asking me what the book was about.